The Irish language, Gaeilge, is enjoying a renaissance

TOM HUNDLEYChicago Tribune

Published Saturday, December 04, 2004

DUBLIN -- From George Bernard Shaw to Samuel Beckett, from William Butler Yeats to James Joyce, the Irish have long been masters of the English language. It's the Irish language that has them stammering.

English has been on a 700-year march across Ireland, relentlessly pushing the Irish language, or Gaeilge, toward oblivion. These days, Irish survives as an everyday language mainly in a half-dozen scattered regions on Ireland's sparsely populated western edge.

Yet statistically speaking, the Irish language is in good shape. It may even be undergoing a renaissance of sorts.

According to the Irish government's 2002 census, 1.57 million of the island's 4 million inhabitants say they can speak Irish -- up from 1.43 million in 1996. But experts say the number of people who are truly fluent in the language and use it on a daily basis is much smaller, 150,000 to 300,000.

Still, this is better than Gaeilge's Celtic language cousins in Scotland, Cornwall and on the Isle of Man. The number of Scottish Gaelic speakers has dipped below 60,000 and continues to decline, while the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1891 and the last native speaker of Manx died in 1937.

Welsh is the only Celtic language besides Irish that appears to be thriving, with 582,400 Welsh claiming to have some knowledge of their ancestral tongue, according to the 2001 census. Despite having to share its small island with the most rapacious of modern languages, Irish has withstood the English onslaught mainly because Irish language study is a mandatory part of the national school curriculum through 12th grade.

For generations of Irish students, language study was a drudge -- no more exciting than the Roman Catholic catechism, another mandatory school subject. But in the last decade or so, Irish has become more popular.

"What has happened is that Irish has become cool and trendy. You could call it the yuppification of the language," said Padhraic O Ciardha, an executive at TG4, a state-sponsored Irish-language TV station that began broadcasting eight years ago.

O Ciardha, who is from the Irish-speaking area of Connemara, on Galway Bay, learned English as a second language.

"When I was a kid in the '60s and '70s, Irish was very uncool. When we'd go into Galway, we'd speak in a whisper. Irish was the badge of the rural, the backward, the culturally repressed part of Ireland," he said.

But as Ireland transformed itself from one of Europe's poorest countries into one of its most prosperous, as it reversed a century-long trend of population decline, and as it sought out a sense of its own individuality in the age of globalization, the Irish rediscovered their language.

Over the last 20 years, the number of schools in which Irish is the language of instruction has multiplied tenfold, and some of the schools are far beyond the Irish-speaking enclaves on the country's periphery.

In a global economy where English is king, why bother with an obscure language spoken by no one beyond the country's borders?

"Because its part of our human heritage," said Jeosamh Mac Donnacha, an Irish language scholar at the National University of Ireland's Galway campus. "We should be just as concerned about preserving a language as we are about preserving historic buildings."

The Irish language reached its peak in the 14th century when it was spoken throughout Ireland, in most of Scotland and in parts of western England.

"That lasted until the Irish aristocracy lost power and English became the language of politics, the court and eventually the marketplace," said Mac Donnacha.

"The final big blow was the famine of 1845," he said. "Most of the people who died or who immigrated were the poorest, and they were the Irish speakers." Eamon de Valera, the father of modern Ireland, dreamed of an independent island united by a revived language. But even de Valera, who was born in New York, first had to learn the language.

When the Irish Free State came into existence in 1922, the new constitution defined Irish as the "national language" with English "equally recognized as an official language."

The new government confidently adopted an education policy designed to replace English with Irish. They underestimated the power of the English juggernaut.

Irish language remains a prerequisite for university matriculation. Lawyers and judges are required to have a working knowledge of the language, and up until last month, so too were the police. The words of the national anthem are in Irish, but for most citizens, Irish was something that was beaten into them in school -- and promptly forgotten after graduation.

The language also lost some of its luster when, in the 1970s, it became associated with the violent nationalism of the Irish Republican Army. Many IRA men learned the language in British prisons.

These days, no one expects Irish to supplant English, but Irish has found its niche in a country that seems increasingly comfortable in its bilingualism.

"Irish has been stabilized," Mac Donnacha said. "The education system has shown it can produce competent bilingual speakers generation after generation. I think it's safe to say the Irish language will be with us for many years to come."